


Chains

by Kipler (Fillyjonk)



Category: X-Files - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:15:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4926421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fillyjonk/pseuds/Kipler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An X-File, set after "Memento Mori"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Part 1

Mulder leaned back into the car and tossed his coat across the driver's seat.

"It's warm out," he said.

Scully smiled. It was good today; the afternoon air was thick with the smell of loose, melting earth, and temperatures had hit fifty degrees. Mulder was caught up in this new case. It was almost possible to forget winter, to put February out of mind.

She climbed out of the car and looked at the large house. It sat hulking on the land, its paint greyed and peeling, its roof dripping pale water slowly down into the mud of the ground below. The snow that had fallen the night before was struggling to make its way down into the soil.

Scully moved to the tall, red-haired woman standing by the driveway.

"Anne O'Hara," the woman said, offering her hand, "I take it you're agent Scully?"

Scully smiled. "And this is my partner, Fox Mulder."

Anne O'Hara shook Mulder's hand and gestured toward the run-down house behind her.

"This is Dad's house - the house where I grew up. My son and I moved in, after my divorce. We thought we'd be able to save on rent, and take care of Dad at the same time..."

The woman paused and her voice cracked. Mulder touched her arm.

"Are you all right, Ms. O'Hara?"

She managed a weak smile, and shook her head slightly.

"I'll be fine," she said, though her voice was thick and heavy and her eyes were red. "I just want to find out what was going on."

"You believe that your father's death was not an isolated event?" Scully asked.

"Yes," the woman stammered. "Please, come in."

The house was warm and shadowed, its rooms lit by the thin filtered light coming through the afternoon haze. It was an old man's house, full of the smell of cigar smoke and old books and undusted shelves. A grandfather smell. From somewhere upstairs came the sound of a radio, shouting with static and something vaguely musical.

"Marilyn Manson," Mulder said, glancing around.

Anne O'Hara smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

"My son Josh," she said. "He's doing his English homework. He claims that the music helps him learn better. I don't argue with him anymore."

The woman moved to the window and looked out. Her face was hidden.

"Ms. O'Hara," Scully said, "You said on the phone that your father died of a heart attack. What would cause you to believe that this was anything other than a natural occurrence?"

O'Hara opened the doors of a tall wooden cabinet and shuffled through piles of papers and notebooks. She hoisted an unwieldy volume down from one of the shelves.

"My father never threw anything away," she said apologetically.

Dust flew into the light as the woman opened the book. The smell of age and time crept into the air.

"I think I need to start at the beginning," said Anne O'Hara. "My father was in the Navy in World War II."

Lining the dark pages of the album, tucked into tiny metal clips, were cracking black-and-white photographs. Scully smiled at the familiar monotony of the first shots. Ocean. Endless grey ocean from the side of a ship.

Anne O'Hara flipped past the opening images, and moved on to photographs of men sitting around a metal barrel playing poker, men posing with liferafts, men in their sleeping quarters. Scully was startled, as always, by the youth of the men. The soldiers of World War II should be fathers, little-league coaches, middle-aged politicians. Grandfathers. Not boys.

"Where did he serve?" Scully asked.

"South Pacific," said O'Hara. "First in Australia. But then New Guinea... the Philippines. Here...." She flipped a few more pages. There were more young men, standing among exotic-looking trees, posing with exotic-looking natives.

Mulder pointed to a photo of a young woman, her bare, pendulous breasts focused dead-center.

"I bet that was a hard one to explain to mother," he said.

"Yes, well, that's not one Dad kept around for us kids to see." Anne O'Hara smiled. "I don't think I knew this album existed it until I was twenty-one. But those men aren't the ones who matter, anyway."

The woman paged past photos of scenery and tents and one very large snake, until there was a gap in the continuum. Several pages were blank, and then, loose and alone, there was one last photograph. This one showed three men, shirtless and impossibly thin, squinting into the sun. They stood, their feet hobbled by leg-irons, their hands manacled together. The man on the left bore a huge gash on his cheek. The one in the middle was missing his front teeth. They looked small and ghostly amid the lush vegetation.

"That," said Anne O'Hara, pointing to the man in the middle, "Is my father."

"POW?" Mulder said.

"Yes. In the islands. They were liberated three weeks after the surrender of Japan. Ben Oak - he's the one on the right - came home with my father. They were shipped to San Francisco, and then sent to a rehabilitation hospital on the coast of New Hampshire. I'm not sure - Dad never spoke about it - but I think they were there for a long time."

The woman closed the album and sighed.

"After the war, my father stayed in touch with Ben Oak and some of the men he met during his recovery. They were close - like a family. A lot of them settled in the Northeast. I don't know... maybe they didn't have any homes to go to, or maybe they all just landed where they were tossed. Anyway, they stayed close. They used to have reunions, every summer. We kids got to know each other. And they were obsessive about writing letters to each other. That's why I know my father's death isn't normal."

Scully tilted her head questioningly.

"When my father died," said Anne O'Hara. "I tried to call one of the men - Dad's friend Samuel Jacobsen - to let him know. He lives about an hour from here. But when I made the call, Sam's daughter Joanna told me that her father had died just two days before. Undiagnosed cancer, is what they said. And then I got another call from Richie Arakelian. His father had died of a stroke - three weeks earlier. And Frank Ely was gone, too... he'd fallen down the stairs."

Mulder caught Scully's gaze, raised his eyebrows slightly. She managed a small shrug in return.

"Ms. O'Hara," she said in a calm voice, "We understand the trauma involved in losing a parent, but with men in this age group, the chances are..."

"Please," the woman said. "All those men were happy and healthy until two months ago. It doesn't make sense that they'd all die in such a short time. It has something to do with that hospital, with that group, with those reunions."

"Do you have any further evidence?" Scully asked.

"This has happened before. Men from the group, dying."

"Before?"

"When I was a girl. One summer they held the reunion at a campground in New York state. But some of the children weren't there: two fathers had died during the year. I remember it felt... strange. I was only about thirteen. Anyway... one night the rest of us were having a bonfire on the sand by the lake. A car drove up, and Mrs. Summering and Mrs. Johnson got out. They were crazy - screaming and saying crazy things. I remember Mrs. Summering especially. She kept shouting, 'You killed them. You killed them. And soon you'll die, too!' "

There was a lingering silence in the room.

"What happened then?" Scully finally asked.

"Nothing," said O'Hara. "We were scared. Someone's mother was crying. Someone's father came and got the two women out of there. I heard my mother arguing with my father, all night. But we never saw those women again. And no one ever brought the whole thing up. Until our fathers started to die. Then we remembered. And we want to know what's going on."

Scully took out her notepad and poised to write.

"All these men," she asked. "Did they all sail with your father?"

"No... At least, I don't think so. Some of them were in his crew. Some were in the hospital with him."

"Do you have the names and addresses of any of them? Know where we can contact them?"

"Most of them, I think... There's a box of letters upstairs, in the crawlspace over Josh's room. Like I said, Dad never threw anything away. And he was fanatical about keeping up with his correspondence."

"May we borrow the letters?"

"Certainly."

Anne O'Hara climbed quickly up the narrow wooden steps as Mulder and Scully followed. The shuddering sound of rock music was suddenly silenced as Mulder and Scully reached the top. A lanky teenage boy stood in the doorway of a room on the left.

"Josh, this is Agent Mulder and Agent Scully," said Anne O'Hara. "They're here about your grandfather."

The boy nodded slowly.

"From the FBI?" he asked.

"Yes," said his mother. "I hope your room is clean."

The boy shrugged.

Anne O'Hara pulled on a rope hanging from the hallway ceiling. A small stepladder folded down, and she clambered up it. Mulder started after her. Scully glanced down at her own high heels and short skirt.

"Um, Mulder..." she said.

"I'll handle this one, Scully," he said, smiling slightly.

"Thanks."

Scully glanced toward the boy, who was watching her intently.

"Working on your homework?" she asked.

The boy nodded.

"English?"

The boy nodded again, looked up at the crawlspace, and then shrugged.

"Poetry," he said.

"What's the assignment?" Scully asked.

The boy tossed his head slightly, and moved into his room. Scully looked through the doorway and smiled. Sweatshirts and socks lay scattered across the floor; CD boxes covered the bed. The boy looked back to Scully, and shrugged again.

"It's not so clean."

"Well, the FBI doesn't like to get involved in things like that," said Scully.

The boy reached to his desk and handed Scully a packet of papers, stapled together, with three holes punched in their left side. A bright purple cover read, "Winter Poems."

"We have to read all those poems and then write a report about the metaphor in one. What it's really about. I'm doing the first one."

Scully smiled and glanced down at the printed page in front of her.

          Whose woods these are I think I know.  
          His house is in the village though;  
          He will not see me stopping here  
          To watch his woods fill up with snow.

"Robert Frost," Scully said. "I used to read that one when I was a little girl. I'll bet I haven't thought of it since senior English class."

"So what's it really about?" Josh O'Hara asked.

Scully smiled.

"That is the question. I remember we used to argue about it. Some people insisted that the narrator was talking about - "

But she was interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps overhead, as Mulder emerged from the crawlspace, dirty and carrying a pile of cardboard boxes.

"I hope you're not allergic, Scully," he said, blowing a thick layer of dust into the air. "But I think these letters should give us as many names and addresses as we need to do a preliminary investigation."

"Good," Scully said. "And good luck on your homework, Josh."

She moved to hand the papers back to the boy. He shook his head.

"I've got another copy of that Robert Frost poem. You can keep the rest of them. I don't even want to think about them."

Scully smiled.

"Thanks."

They moved to the front door of the house. The shadows had grown longer.

"Thank you for taking the time to speak to me," said Anne O'Hara. "Is there any other information I can give you?"

Mulder nodded.

"I would like to know the specifics of your father's military service. Where he was captured, when he was released, the name of the rehabilitation hospital he was sent to..."

Anne O'Hara sighed and looked out across the lawn

"I don't know. I don't even know the year he was captured. Isn't that strange? All those summers, together, all those years with my father and his friends? You would think I'd know more about his life. But I... he never spoke about that time. I guess I didn't know him as a man... I guess I only know him as my father."

O'Hara turned and clutched her hands together.

"But now I need to know why he died."

Mulder hoisted three unwieldy cardboard boxes onto his desk. Scully fixed her gaze on him.

"Mulder," she said, "Don't you think it's likely that all those men died of natural causes? If they were in World War II, they'd have to be in their seventies or eighties."

"Well, I'll admit that they weren't very good insurance risks, Scully... But it is a pretty big coincidence, don't you think? Four men from such a close-knit group, dying within a month of each other? And those screaming women at the campground? Who knows?"

"Mulder... It's easy to try to fix blame when someone you love dies. Believing that there is a deliberate force at work gives the survivor a sense of purpose - it makes the loss seem less random and more meaningful. It would be like that for Anne O'Hara and her friends, and it would especially be like that for two young women who were left to raise families alone. I would hate to lead these people on. I would hate to feed their denial."

A silence from Mulder, for just the quickest moment. And then it was gone.

"I agree, Scully. But it can't hurt to poke around a little bit... read these letters." Mulder picked up a pile of envelopes and shuffled through them. "Besides, it's not often we get a chance to go through someone else's private mail."

Scully smiled slightly.

"Fifty years of baby announcements, gall bladder operations, and tax complaints?"

Mulder shrugged.

"Look on the bright side. It could be fifty years of scandalous gossip and indelicate indiscretions..."

"OK, Mulder... Look... you start with the indiscretions. I'll see what I can find out about these deaths. Give me the personal information of the men who've died."

Scully took the names and addresses, moved to her computer, and began to call up access to local newspapers. It was a tedious job. She slogged slowly through recent weeks, reading aloud to Mulder as she took notes on the pertinent obituaries.

"Hartford, Connecticut. Samuel A. Jacobsen, South Windsor florist and W.W.II veteran, died Wednesday after a sudden illness. Mr. Jacobsen was seventy-four years of age. He leaves behind three children, Joanna, John, and Alice... "

Scully continued on through two more obituaries. More of the same. Local men, local papers, local contributions. Scully shut down the program she was using and leaned back to rest her eyes. Mulder didn't look up from the page he was reading.

"This is strange," he said.

"What's that?"

"This letter... it's not from one person. It's a round robin, from a whole lot of men. Someone in Massachusetts started it out, but then there are comments by more and more people."

"Any good gossip?" Scully asked.

"Well, Pete's sister Miggy married that Harold Stevenson. Who'd have thought?"

"There. I told you there wouldn't be any scandals, Mulder. This is World War II we're talking about. All the soldiers were good and upright and true."

"Yeah... and now they're all dying suddenly."

"It's hardly an epidemic, Mulder. These obituaries don't sound in any way out of the ordinary. These are old men dying of the typical diseases of old age."

Mulder shrugged his shoulders and put down the letter in his hand. He fixed his eyes on Scully.

"OK... OK. Scully, I'm sorry. Look, it's late. Go home and get some rest."

His voice was deep and quiet, his eyes locked on hers. Scully shifted uncomfortably.

"And you?"

"I'm going to stay a while and read through some more of these. They're really kind of interesting... Cold war history."

Scully stood and picked up her coat. Mulder had read her tone; he was all concentrated inattention, now, impossibly absorbed by whatever piece of news he was reading. He'd be here all night trying to plow through the letters. Scully picked up a cardboard box and tucked it under her arm.

Two hours later, she lay in her bed, surrounded by the crackling, fading remainders of fifty years of correspondence. She scribbled the last entry on the branching flow chart she had drawn. It was a long, intricate sorting of names. She checked the clock. She picked up the phone, then set it down again.

She flipped the page over and realized that she'd been writing on the back of Josh O'Hara's poetry assignments. Winter Poems. She opened to the Robert Frost.

          The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  
          But I have promises to keep,  
          And miles to go before I sleep,  
          And miles to go before I sleep.

She must have been nine or ten, the first time she read those words. It had been a sultry summer night, and winter had seemed far off and mysterious. Somewhere her mind still stored the image of that reading: the living room carpet, the thick red book lying open on the floor, the quiet of the house. The dark and the slant of the kitchen light falling across the pages of her book. The gentle fall of snow in the cold woods. Her father's voice calling her to bed.

The phone rang. She glanced at the clock. Two hours. It would be Mulder.

"Hi."

"Hi." Mulder's voice shook the poem loose from Scully's mind. "It's not too late, is it? Were you asleep?"

"Well, I am reclining, Mulder. But I was... I got involved in reading some of these letters."

"So did I, Scully. And I decided to locate those two women that Anne O'Hara spoke about - the ones who went crazy at the summer camp - to see what they had to say."

"Did you find them?"

"Just one. Mrs. Johnson seems to have disappeared into the mist of history. But I managed to track down Mrs. Susanna Summering Keaton, formerly of Watertown, New York, and now of Sitka, Alaska."

"And...?"

"And she claims that her husband died because of those letters you're reading."

"Because of the letters?"

"Yeah. Listen to this, Scully. Mrs. Keaton says that her husband died because he stopped writing to those other men - because Ben Oak made Stephen Summering part of his chain letter, and because Stephen broke the chain. And she says that Hal Johnson died because he came immediately after Summering in the chain."

Scully left a suitable period of bemused silence on her end of the phone.

"Mulder, you don't believe that..."

There was a pause.

"Have you ever considered chain letters, Scully?" Mulder asked.

"Only when I throw them out in my e-mail."

"Their history is fascinating... they've spread around the world as fast as written communication."

"It's not surprising, Mulder. They're just another form of gambling, and people have been finding ways to lose money since history began. Chain letters. Amway. It's all the same."

"But they're not all money-making schemes. Many of them are good-luck totems... modern versions of blessings sent from one village to another. Postal novenas."

Scully tilted her head slightly.

"With big warnings at the end that say, 'Pass this on or else?' "

"Well," said Mulder. "Maybe there is something to all those warnings. You know... 'Tom Sanders broke this chain letter and a week later he was crushed by a dumptruck.' "

"They're urban legends, Mulder. Ones that not even teenagers believe. Besides... these letters are downright boring. There's no hint of a threat in anything the men say. There is no 'or else.' Why would it be so important for them to pass on information about their remarriages and grandchildren?"

"I don't know... I don't know, Scully. But these men were returning from some very unusual circumstances. Have you read about the South Pacific? Do you know that many of the local peoples there remained largely out of contact with the outside world until they were forced into contact by the war?"

"Yes... but what does one thing have to do with another?"

"Well, maybe the men... learned something over there. Maybe they were obligated to stay in touch with one another. Maybe breaking the chain unleashed some sort of..."

Scully waited. Mulder didn't say it.

"A curse?"

Mulder maintained a voice of complete plausibility.

"Yes. A curse."

Scully sighed and stretched her neck. The bedside clock ticked.

"I suppose," she said at last, "That it might make sense psychologically. If the men believed that the letters had some ritual significance, they might create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doom themselves with the power of their own expectations. These deaths could be due to psychogenic illnesses or accidents."

"A rose by any other name..."

Scully smiled into the telephone.

"So... did you get anything from the letters?" Mulder asked after a pause.

"Well I think I've found a pattern. We've got twenty-two men writing to each other. And there seems to be some sort of assigned rotation to the writing. All the letters originate with this Ben Oak, in Boston, and they all end up with Bill O'Hara... but there are a lot of gaps in the information. I think there must be other letters out there that followed some other rotation - that didn't end with Bill O'Hara. One of the other men must have them. Or maybe all of them have some."

"I think you're right. And Scully - did you say there were twenty-two names on your list?"

"Well, as of last summer, yes. That was before those four men died, of course. Eighteen, now. Why?"

"I've been working on reading the very oldest letters, the ones from the late forties, and there are forty-five men on the list I've compiled. Somewhere along the line we've lost twenty-three, even before the four recent deaths."

"Hardly surprising. Half of the men who survived World War II have died. And some might have just stopped writing."

"No, it's not surprising," Mulder said. "But... Well, we know that two men died the year Anne O'Hara was thirteen. I wonder if I can find out how they died. And how many of the others have died. There must be military records."

"Sounds like a good job for the morning, Mulder."

A soft chuckle came over the line.

"I'll stop reading about the case if you'll stop reading about the case."

Scully smiled into the phone.

"I've stopped. Actually, I was reading some poetry, Mulder."

"I've always said you were a renaissance woman, Scully."

And then a long silence.

Night, and the heavy, slow unwinding of things.

"Mulder."

"Yeah."

"I'll see you in the morning."

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Part 2

Seven o'clock. The sound of Mulder's paper shuffling came through the office door as Scully entered.

"Did you even go home last night?"

Mulder looked up at her, scanned her face. And smiled - the loose, easy smile of morning.

"Think of it this way, Scully: You should be thankful that I showed enough forbearance to keep myself from calling you at two-thirty."

Scully arched her eyebrows and looked at the pile of paperwork lying in front of Mulder.

"What did you find out?"

"Well," Mulder said, gesturing toward his computer monitor, "That the military records available to us are remarkably detailed and up-to-date. That Bill O'Hara and Ben Oak were both patients at the Portsmouth Veterans' Rehabilitation Hospital after the war, as were, apparently, most of the other men in the group. That they were all honorably discharged into civilian life."

Mulder paused for dramatic effect.

"And?"

"And all twenty-three men who are not on the current mailing list are dead, Scully. Of what appear to be natural circumstances."

"Appear to be..."

"Yes. All seemingly random, all involving various illnesses or accidents."

"Mm hmm... But..."

"But these deaths occur in distinct waves, Scully. Look at this... In 1952, three men die - George Price, Alex Urrutia, Johnson LeJune. Then there are no deaths in the group until 1961, when seven men die. Then again, everyone's healthy until 1974, and three more die. Those are the two deaths that Anne O'Hara remembers - the ones with the screaming widows - and another one. In 1979 three men die. And finally, in 1982 - that's the year my set of letters ended - the group loses eight men. Eight men, all in one year, Scully. And none in the years between. And now, within the last six weeks, they lose four more."

"That's..." Scully began.

"Beyond probability."

"Theories?"

"I don't know, Scully. But if Susanna Summering was right, then these deaths represent men who broke the chain letter - and the men who were meant to come after them in the chain. That would explain the waves."

Scully moved to Mulder's computer and sat down. She glanced quickly at Mulder, started to speak, and then stopped herself.

"What are you doing?" he asked her.

She held up a finger.

"Hold on a minute..." She tapped a name into the keyboard, and waited while the screen changed. "I don't..."

She typed in another. Then another. And another. And let out a long, slow sigh.

"What is it, Scully?"

"These other men, Mulder. The names from my pile of letters - the eighteen survivors."

Mulder moved closer to the computer and scanned the screen.

"What?"

"Out of eighteen men, Mulder, all but four are dead."

Mulder shook his head slowly. His eyes widened slightly.

"And then there were none," he said.

"Or four."

"Maybe we should talk to them."

"Maybe we should."

The dirty snowbanks ran into the grey of the parking lot that surrounded the wide, artless grey building. Scully pulled her coat tighter around her as she stepped across the layer of ice underfoot. The cold wind smelled of ocean and diesel fuel.

Mulder held the door against the blast of air, and Scully walked into the lobby. A sign above the reception desk labeled the place: "New England Veterans' Retirement Village."

"Excuse me," Scully said to the nurse behind the reception desk. "We called earlier. We've come to visit a man named Ben Oak?"

The nurse smiled.

"Yes. He's on... let me see..." the woman checked a clipboard. "He's on floor six. Room F17."

The halls of floor six gleamed with an institutional grey-flecked brightness. Scully stepped off the elevator and looked left, then right, reading room numbers. At the end of one hallway, silhouetted against the light from the window, an old man was being walked, his left arm supported by a nurse.

"This doesn't look like a retirement village," Mulder said.

"No," Scully agreed. "It looks like a nursing home."

The narrow bed of room F17 was made up tightly. No one sat in the blue vinyl chair near the window. The shades were drawn. Mulder parted them briefly; there was a glimpse of blue-grey ocean past train tracks and industrial storage tanks. Scully gazed at the photos sitting framed on a small chest of drawers. Two small girls, under a Christmas tree, flanked by a sea of tiny stuffed animals. "Merry Christmas, Gramp -1996." Two other small girls from perhaps thirty years ago, smiling up in bunny suits and fading ink. A woman on her wedding day, eyes dark and mysterious in sepia tones. A black and white shot of a group of young men in seaman's uniforms, carefully organized on the entry staircase of a large building. A scrawling label: "The Boys." Another black and white: a stretch of tropical beach and a white-haired native man, his head tilted, smiling into the camera: "Holy Man."

Scully looked for a long time at the photos. A lifetime, condensed into five portraits.

A nurse entered, carrying a tray of medications.

"May I help you?" she asked, moving toward the dresser. Scully moved out of her way.

"We're here to visit Ben Oak." Mulder said.

"Oh, he's in the sitting room, down at the end of the hall. I'll take you."

The sitting room was really a widening of the hallway. It contained a dozen or so blue vinyl chairs, all matching the one from room F17, scattered about in a seemingly random pattern. Seated in the chairs were a half dozen old men. Two played checkers over a small table. One sat dozing by the window. Three stared at a television set, absorbed by the sight of five leather-bound teenage girls shouting obscenities at each other. The air was stiflingly warm, here. All the men were wearing sweaters.

The woman nodded toward the man at the window. He was a small man, swallowed by the chair. He was neatly dressed in grey trousers and a white shirt, and his white hair was combed carefully to one side. He looked out the window through half-closed eyes.

"Mr. Oak gets drowsy at this time of day," the nurse said.

"Will he mind if we ask him some questions?" Scully asked.

"Questions?" The woman sounded startled.

"Yes... Is there a problem with that? We spoke to the receptionist earlier, and explained our reasons for coming. She said that Mr. Oak would be happy to receive visitors - "

"No..." said the woman. "You see, the receptionist doesn't know the residents. Mr. Oak is always happy to receive visitors. It's just that he won't be able to answer any questions."

"What do you mean?"

"Ms... Scully, is it? Ben Oak doesn't speak. He had a stroke... he's suffering from aphasia."

Mulder glanced at Scully, then back at the nurse.

"He can't speak at all?"

"No words. He has some hand gestures which we understand, but no sentences. With this form of aphasia, there's an impaired ability to produce language - either spoken or written."

"But we have a number of letters written by Ben Oak from this address over the last six years," Mulder said.

"Yes," said the woman. "I'm sure that's true. Mr. Oak used to live on Floor Two - in our independent residence area. He only just suffered his stroke in late November."

Mulder shook his head an moved toward the window where Ben Oak sat. He squatted down in front of the man and began talking softly.

Scully turned toward the nurse.

"What are his chances of recovery?"

"It's hard to say. There are some stroke victims who recover fully from aphasia. But it's been almost eight weeks, now, for Mr. Oak. I haven't seen much of a change. He is seventy-seven years old. Most of the time, he just sits in that chair."

"Does he have any relatives who visit? Family members?"

"Yes," said the nurse. "A daughter. She lives up in Exeter, but she visits every week. She should be here on Saturday."

"May I have her phone number?"

The nurse shifted uncomfortably.

"We're not in the habit of releasing personal information about family members..."

Scully reached into her pocket and opened her badge for the woman to see.

"My partner and I are investigating a series of suspicious deaths. We would like to speak to Mr. Oak's daughter."

"I'll get you the information."

The nurse moved away. Scully crossed to stand with Mulder. He squatted still, looking into Ben Oak's eyes, speaking quietly about the weather, the predictions for more snow, the lengthening days. The sunlight hit the old man's face, and he tilted his head back, smiling.

Mulder looked at Ben Oak and Ben looked back, his clouded blue eyes intent. He seemed to be listening, seemed to understand the words Mulder was saying. But there were no words in response.

"I have to be going, Mr. Oak," Mulder said. "Thank you for seeing me."

Ben Oak reached up his left hand. Mulder shook it.

The car hit another pothole and Scully was jerked uncomfortably awake. She cleared her throat and leaned her head against the window of the car. The glass was cold against her forehead, but she left it there, trading the discomfort of the chill for the chance to relax her neck for a few minutes. She sighed. It had been a long day, with a long wait at the airport in Boston and a long drive from Augusta, Maine to this tiny road in the woods.

"What was that you were saying this morning, Mulder? That the drive from Boston would be nothing?"

"Distance is all relative, Scully," Mulder started playfully. But then he halted himself and his voice changed. "Look, if you're tired, if you want to call it a day, we can go back now, and find a hotel - "

Scully cut him off.

"What time was Keller expecting us?" There was a hint of irritation in her voice, and she called it back.

"Five-thirty. We have another twenty minutes. Are we going to make it?"

"Well... it should be about ten miles. Assuming we made the right turn back there."

Mulder lapsed into awkward silence. Scully let him. She looked out the window of the car. The road was narrow, barely two lanes, fenced by pine forest. In the woods, where the shade of the trees blocked the sun, there were patches of grimy white scattered among the black tree trunks. On the roadside here and there were dirty snowbanks. The road was wet with the melt of the day, freezing over now into black ice. The wind slid across the pavement, carrying loose, dry leaves and small twigs. Somewhere low, behind the treetops, the sun was going down. The last cold, rosy lines of light glared through the windshield. The glass was ice on Scully's skin.

She raised her head and rifled through the papers on her lap. James Keller. 22 Bear Camp Road. Alleman, Maine. That was the address. Scully smiled slightly, staring at the page opposite the address. Poems again. Too many notes on this case were written on Josh O'Hara's homework. This one was Coleridge. Long and brutal for a high school student. She jumped to the end.

          ...whether the eave-drops fall  
          heard only in the trances of the blast,  
          Or if the secret ministry of frost  
          Shall hang them up in silent icicles,  
          Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Scully tried to imagine sweetness in the cold pouring through the window glass and in the darkness settling down on them. She could not. She shut the booklet. The car was a long time in silence.

"There's a sign," Scully said, finally.

Mulder squinted against the glare of the sunset.

"Yes... We're right. Alleman, three miles."

Three miles ran slowly, through the tunnel of trees, but at last the trees broke and the road met another one, running crosswise off into its own wooded places. At the crossroads was a sign: "Welcome to Alleman. Great Fishing. Population 472."

Scully guessed that the 472 was hyperbole. The town was little more than a cluster of buildings, trailing away from the intersection where the two roads met. At one corner stood a small school building of red brick. The schoolyard was broken and covered with patches of crusty snow and ice. A rusted swingset sat off to one side, and most of its swings were loose and dangling, frozen into the ice-filled, foot-dug trenches beneath them. Across from the school sat Thompson's Market, with a sign boasting "Everything from Gherkins to Gasoline," and opposite the market was a rambling white farmhouse whose first floor had been turned into the "Alleman Video Mart." A few dozen houses, some well-maintained and some with boarded windows, rounded out the civilized portion of the road.

Scully supposed that somewhere, in among these trees, there were smaller roads and more houses. And there were probably hundreds of summer cottages, too, squatting by lakes and ponds, where people could take advantage of the "Great Fishing." But for now, in the deepening evening of February, the town looked very small and very much its own.

James Keller lived at 22 Bear Camp Road, in a loosening yellow house on the left side of the road about a mile past the intersection. It was surrounded by the trunks of pines; the road here began to give itself back to trees and wildness. As Mulder pulled the car into the driveway, the front door of the house opened, and yellow light spilled across the darkened ground. A man stepped out onto the concrete stairway.

Scully climbed out of the car and reached for her mittens. She turned toward the man's voice.

"I take it you're Agents Scully and Mulder," he said, offering his hand. "I'm James Keller. Come on in, now. It's cold out here tonight."

Scully studied Keller. He was a great man - tall and barrel-chested, with a wiry grey brush-cut on his head. Thick glasses dwarfed his eyes, and a wide scar crawled down the weathered skin of his left cheek. His voice was deep and booming.

He ushered them into a dining room and sat them at a thick wooden table.

"Just let me tell my wife you're here," Keller said and wandered out of the room.

Scully looked at Mulder and saw a flash of amusement cross his face.

"The walls have eyes, Scully."

And indeed they did. From the four walls of the room stared the glass-eyed faces of half a dozen mounted deer heads and one bull moose.

Scully gestured with her eyebrows to the wall behind Mulder. He swung around and found himself nearly face-to-face with the mounted, anatomically correct posterior end of a deer.

A loud voice came through the door.

"This is my wife, Mariana," James Keller said.

"Mrs. Keller," said Scully, reaching out her hand.

"Hello, there," the wife said.

She smiled shyly at Scully, and took her offered hand gently. She was markedly torpedo-shaped: her body had one uniform circumference from sternum to pelvis. But her girth surprised Scully less than her accent and features. She was not a girl from the woods of Maine. Under the grey-streaked hair, the low hairline, were broad Asian features and dark mottled skin. Scully quickly imagined a young girl from the South Pacific, marrying a dashing US serviceman at the end of the great war. And just as quickly wondered whether that young girl's romantic imaginings had ever placed her here fifty years later, standing under the mounted remains of a deer's behind.

"Mariana, get me some coffee," said Joseph Keller.

The woman lowered her head and shuffled out of the dining room. Scully had another vision, of an episode of "Oprah" she'd seen one day, with a half-dozen Filipina mail-order brides, and the men who swore they were better wives than American women because they were obedient to their husbands.

Keller sat down across from Mulder and folded his hands in front of him.

"You said you wanted to talk to me about my experiences in the war? What is this all about?"

"Actually, Mr. Keller," Mulder said, "we want to talk with you about your experiences with a group of men carrying out a round robin correspondence."

"The chain letters?"

"Yes. You've been in contact with those men?"

"Yes. I write to them."

"Mr. Keller, what is your link to the other men in the chain letter? Did you know them all during the war? Did you know them from the hospital?"

"No." The man sounded insulted - angry, even - at the implication. "I didn't need to go to any hospital. I was fine."

"So how were you connected to those men?"

Keller looked up.

"We all knew Ben."

"Excuse me?"

"We all knew Ben Oak. That's why we're in that group. He's the one who started it and keeps it going. He's the one who writes letters to all of us."

"Mr. Keller," said Scully, "Are you aware that in the past two months, at least eighteen of those men on your list have died?"

She watched Keller's face fall. He had not been aware.

"Ben?"

"He's alive," Scully answered. "But he's had a stroke. They're uncertain whether he will recover."

Keller's body was still except for his left hand, which lay shaking on the table. Mulder looked awkwardly at Scully, and then back at the man.

"We're sorry, Mr. Keller," he said. "But... we were hoping that you could give us some insight into the causes of these deaths. There seems to have been a recurring pattern, over the years."

Keller was silent for several minutes. Scully thought he hadn't heard Mulder. But then he spoke.

"Pattern?" he said, his voice low.

"People dying."

Keller's fingers drummed against the tabletop. He looked at Mulder as he spoke.

"People die. You can't blame anyone. You can't blame Ben..."

"No one is blaming anyone," Scully said. "Why would you think that -?"

Just at that moment, James Keller's wife shuffled into the room, carrying a tray loaded with coffee and mugs. Keller looked away abruptly; it was clear that he would not talk with the woman in the room. She poured the coffee and stood in the doorway until her husband signaled her away.

"Why would you think that anyone blames Ben Oak?" Scully asked again.

Keller's eyes were focused somewhere far away as he spoke.

"Those women, that summer at camp. Stephen Summering's wife, and Hal Johnson's. They blamed Ben for killing their husbands. And the letters. But it wasn't Ben. People die. Ben Oak is a good man. In the war, on Tamarau, he was... he was our leader."

Scully's mind flashed to Anne O'Hara's photo album of the three gaunt POW's, of the chains on their hands and feet. And of the scarred left cheek of the man in the middle.

"You were with him and Bill O'Hara," she said. "In the prison camp. You were released with him."

"Yes," Keller said. "Ben helped keep us alive. You don't know... the things that happen in a war. I went in when I was nineteen. And then... there were twenty-five of us, rounded up and put in that camp. Only a few of us came out, and none of us the same. Those people... that place... they took the souls out of us. The boys who went into the war at nineteen never came out. But Ben... He's a good man."

"Mr. Keller," Mulder said. "Was there anything... unusual that happened in your group? Anything out of the ordinary that your military service involved? Anything at all that would explain the deaths of all these men?"

Keller paused, as if he were gathering his thoughts. Scully found herself leaning in expectantly. But Keller stood up. He was done.

"People die. All that happens if you ask why is... you get very angry or very scared."

It was nine-thirty by the time they made it out of the woods and found the Lakeside Motel, caught between hunting and fishing seasons and nearly deserted. The heating system was making a half-hearted attempt to heat a room that had been ice cold when they arrived. Scully was tired, dreadfully tired from the day, but Mulder had driven the whole way and it wasn't fair to go to sleep yet, not when he wanted to dissect the case. So Mulder was at his computer at the table by the window, and Scully was in the big chair by the radiator trying to get warm.

"It's clear that James Keller is hiding something from us, Scully."

"You could be right, Mulder. But we can't force him to give us his war photos, his personal correspondence. Not without something more substantial to go on than a possible fifty-year-old... curse."

Mulder smiled slightly.

"The curse theory may be overtaken by the military conspiracy theory, Scully."

"Which says...?"

"Maybe all these men were keeping secrets. Susanna Summering said that her husband and Hal Johnson died because Mr. Summering broke the chain. But maybe he didn't. Maybe the men who died kept the chain too well. Maybe they gave away information that someone didn't want them to share."

"And all those deaths were staged?"

"I'll admit it's a longshot. But we've seen what the military is capable of."

The heating system hissed and clicked, but still the room remained chilly. Scully gave up on the chair and moved to the bed, propping herself against the pillows and scattering the work on the blankets around her.

"So James Keller is no help," Mulder said, "and Ben Oak isn't talking. Who's left?"

"I think we should talk to Ben Oak's daughter, Teresa Fleury. She's nearby, and it's her father who seems to be the big question mark in all this. Surely she'll know something about him."

"As much as Anne O'Hara knew about her father?" Mulder asked. "It's not hard to keep secrets, Scully."

Scully sighed.

"What do you think?"

"Well, we've still got three other living members of the mail chain. One in New York, two in New Jersey. I think we should talk to them. And maybe soon, given the track record of this group."

"OK. So you take New York and New Jersey. I'll stay here and drive down to interview Teresa Fleury. Then we can compare notes."

Mulder's eyes shifted slightly and his jaw tightened.

"What?" Scully asked, before she could catch the word, before she knew.

Mulder shook his head and did not look up at her.

"Nothing. That's fine. It should only take a day or two."

But everything was a measure of time, now, and a day was a day.

It was too much to consider time like this, incessantly, and Scully wished suddenly and overwhelmingly to be released. Not from illness itself - that wish would be hubris - but from the practicalities of it, the urgency of it, the heaviness of it. From the need to think, every time things were easy for a moment, "This is how it always used to be and we didn't know."

Her mind was distracted and she was suddenly very tired. She thought for a few minutes that she was still reading about the case, but really she was looking for the Coleridge poem scattered among all these papers. That line.

          The Frost performs its secret ministry,  
          ...so calm, that it disturbs  
          And vexes meditation with its strange  
          And extreme silentness.

And in the silence of the room, while Mulder worked or pretended to work, Scully read and reread the old words in front of her, and tried to imagine a silence without menace and without weight. But even as she closed her eyes and willed herself to rest, she could feel it pushing on her. And she knew that the weight was half hers and half Mulder's. And the half that was Mulder's did not leave the room until long after sleep had quieted her thoughts.


	3. Chapter 3

Part 3

It was a dim, half-lit afternoon. The car was on Route 1, pointed south. But somewhere ahead there were snow squalls and glare ice, and accidents that shut down the road - so Scully sat and moved in stops and starts. An hour since she had left Exeter. It should have been a twenty-minute trip.

Mulder would be in White Plains by now. His plane had flown out early. The airport in Augusta was small and trusting, if not efficient. Scully had been able to walk right out onto the tarmac as Mulder boarded, to stand there as his plane took off. A strange habit, new these last few weeks - another awkward concession to the rush of time.

She turned the heater up a notch and moved the vent to "defrost."

She glanced at the plastic-wrapped pile of photographs that sat on the passenger seat. A morning interview with Ben Oak's daughter Teresa, and this bag of photos was the only success she'd had. Mulder had been right. Secrets were easy to keep.

"My mother told me," Teresa Fleury had said, "that men who talked about the war were men who didn't know what war could do."

And so Scully was left with nothing more than a pile of borrowed photographs that Ben Oak's daughter had never looked at. No new information about Ben Oak's hospitalization. No outstanding memories of any of the dead men. No knowledge of the chain letters. Just the bland, happy memories of a suburban childhood: of a father who worked at GE and came home every night, who never once mentioned the war in the presence of his child, who kept his war photographs hidden on a bookshelf behind dusty National Geographics. Who spent every year's vacation among living reminders of the war.

Scully sprayed the windshield with wiper fluid and flicked the wipers to clear the grime from her view.

It was better without Mulder here.

Not better. Easier.

For her.

The snow began again in earnest; the trees at the edge of the road were dusted with white. Scully flicked the wipers and leaned forward to see out more clearly. And stepped on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of her. The stopping wasn't as quick as it should have been; for a white instant she envisioned the car sliding through the guard rail, over the embankment, into a cold gully. That would be some cosmic display of irony. A car accident on a highway in New Hampshire, and Mulder all the way down in New York. Some cosmic display of vengeance.

Be careful. Be careful what you think.

One must have a mind of winter.

Wallace Stevens.

Scully smiled. She was beginning to know her poetry.

She considered the man who had been Wallace Stevens - dead four decades, and his words left behind like cryptographs for Josh O'Hara and the other tenth-graders to decipher. The words chosen so carefully, to hang in the air like thought-ghosts. One day there had been spruce trees and snow and a poet watching them. And the day was long-vanished, and Stevens was long-vanished, but the words were alive, still dragging their power after them, forty years later. Like a curse on teenage boys. One must have a mind of winter.

Finally, finally the traffic began to move again. Somewhere ahead the snow squalls must have ended; the last two miles to the hotel took only five minutes.

Scully opened one large album. She recognized the pictures; they were duplicates of the ones she had been shown at Anne O'Hara's house. The photographs were in the same order: the same flat ocean, the same exotic women and picturesque natives. A professional job done by someone who had sailed with Ben Oak and Bill O'Hara. Exotic shots. War as tourism.

Scully set the album aside. She riffled through a pile of small photographs: snapshots, poorly framed and overexposed. On top was a photo of three men - gaunt, chained together, squinting into the sunlight from a corral of lush vegetation. James Keller. Bill O'Hara. Ben Oak.

Scully shook her head slowly. These men, wounded and blinded by the light outside their prison. What liberating soldier had thought to say, "Leave the chains on while I get a shot of this?"

Six o'clock. Scully went to her coat and retrieved her cell phone. She set it on the table beside her.

More photographs. She could recognize the faces, now. Ben Oak in the hospital, smiling next to a nurse. Ben Oak, thicker in the middle, older, on his wedding day, with the dark-eyed bride. Young Ben Oak as a soldier, sitting on a beach, sprawled in the sand. The same shot, but with James Keller. No scar, yet. Not thin, not sick. The two men with two dark-haired girls in native dress. With an old native man on the same beach. Ben Oak alone with the old man.

There was one large black-and-white. It showed a roomful of men, dressed in pajamas, posed in three rows. Six well-coifed postwar nurses flanked the men on either side. On the back of the photo were a series of signatures, arranged as the men and women were arranged. A smeared label read, "Portsmouth. February, 1946." Months after the war had ended. Months after the men had been released from prison camps, from battle, from whatever danger they had survived. Scully wondered why none of their military records showed medical discharges, if they had been in the hospital for such a long time.

There was Ben Oak. There was Bill O'Hara. And Scully scanned the other faces, putting features on the names of the men whose deaths she was investigating. Sam Jacobsen. Frank Ely.

Thirty-seven names, all familiar to Scully from the signatures on the chain letters. Most of the men from the letters were here. And there were others, probably, who had been released before this photo was taken.

Scully kicked off her shoes and looked out the window. The parking lot was white now, and the tire tracks were shiny with freeze. Beautiful. A Norman Rockwell painting. And the accurate and dependable forecast was calling for more snow and dangerous conditions tomorrow evening. She was glad to be indoors for the night.

The phone rang; she picked it up quickly.

"Scully."

"Hi." Mulder's voice. "How're you doing?"

"Fine," she said. "I'm fine."

A brief silence while Mulder accepted the words.

"It's cold in New York, Scully."

"Yeah. It's cold here, too."

Another pause.

"So what did you find out?"

"Not much, Mulder. Ben Oak did not discuss the war with his daughter. Period. I've got some photos, though. How did you do?"

"Well, I just got done visiting Dave Larson in Cincinnati."

"Did he know anything?" Scully asked.

"Not nearly enough, Scully. He's rapidly failing from the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. It's been a sudden decline."

Scully let out a slow breath.

"So he's a blind lead."

"Not quite. I got to talk to his wife, Oola. She seems to have a lot of information. She knew most of the men at the Portsmouth Rehabilitation Hospital. She was a nurse there; that's where she met her husband. I showed her the list of names we had, and she said most of them had gone through the hospital."

Scully reached for the creased 8 X 10 photograph and scanned the names on the back of the page. There she was. Oola Ames. When Scully looked closely at the photo, she could see a manicured hand resting lightly on the shoulder of the last soldier in the top row of the photo. Dave Larson.

"I've got a picture of her right in front of me. What did she tell you?"

"Well, big news first. You know the other two men I hoped to speak to? Mack Levandowsky and Dan Pitman?"

"Yes."

"It seems that Mack is no longer with us."

"How?" Scully asked.

"He died in a car accident on New Year's Eve. Apparently his death record hadn't made it into the computer's database when we searched for it."

"What about the other man - Dan Pitman?"

"Oola Larson didn't know him from the hospital, but she did know him from the reunions. And listen to this, Scully: his home address is St. Patrick's rectory. He's a priest. Oola Larson says that he went into the war an atheist, and found the power of the rosary after being injured at Normandy. Prayed himself to health. He married his fiancee, raised his family, and then when his wife died, he took the vows. I've set up an appointment with him tomorrow."

"Mulder..."

"Yeah?"

"The two men who are alive and healthy - Dan Pitman and James Keller - neither of them spent time in the hospital in Portsmouth."

"That's right. Strange, isn't it?"

"Yes. It bears further investigation. It's too bad Levandowsky and Larson can't give us any information."

"It might not be so bad, Scully. Mrs. Larson is quite a good conversationalist. She gave me some interesting information."

"Like what?" Scully asked.

"The patients at the Portsmouth Rehabilitation Hospital? They were all severely traumatized. By the time they ended up there, most of them had failed to respond to treatment in regular military hospitals around the country. They were psychologically disabled. Chronic cases. The Hospital was a residential psychiatric facility."

Scully scanned the faces of the men in the photograph. They stared up at her blandly. Not one wore a smile. Not one carried the light-heartedness that was his right by his youth. But every one looked sound, whole, ready to join an assembly line and buy a house in Levittown.

"What happened?" she asked. "They were all released. None of them were discharged due to psychological problems."

"That's where it gets interesting. Mrs. Larson says that in the fall of 1945 - which is just around the time Ben Oak was admitted - the men began making steady and marked improvement. Without explanation. By the fall of 1946, they had all been discharged."

"And she has no idea what brought on this improvement?"

"No." Mulder paused for a moment. "But Scully, there is evidence that the United States military was experimenting with psychoactive drugs as early as the 1940's. If these men were incapacitated... hospitalized without hope of recovery..."

"Human guinea pigs?" Scully said.

"It's a possibility. Suppose the government stumbled onto something that actually worked... that reset the brain chemistry of these men? That cured them?"

Scully was silent for a minute, thinking.

"And an experimental treatment from fifty years ago would be worth the military's involvement, all these years later?"

"I don't know how, Scully... But imagine the impact of a drug like this? The implications for society? If someone were trying to control the flow of information about it, and there were men who could leak the information..."

Scully sighed.

"Mulder, it's going to be nearly impossible to follow a trail this old if most of the people involved are dead."

"Maybe not," Mulder answered. "It's a long shot, Scully, but... in that picture you have, is there a nurse named Violet Ramsey?"

Scully flipped the photo over, and found the name. There she was, a tall blond nurse in the back row.

"Yes. Why?"

"Violet Ramsey was the charge nurse on the day shift when Ben Oak and the other men were patients at the hospital. She was the one responsible for distributing medications, for monitoring dosages. And it just happens that Ms. Ramsey has stayed in touch with Oola Larson all these years."

"So where is she now?"

"Still living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Just a stone's throw from you. Would you like her number?"

Scully rummaged for her pen and paper. She jotted down the number.

"OK. I've got it. I'll try to set something up for tomorrow." She paused for a moment, then continued. "What time do you see Father Pitman?"

"He couldn't see me until one o'clock... But I should still be able to make it back. There's a flight that would get me into the city late tomorrow afternoon."

"If they don't close Logan because of the snow..."

A pause.

"That hadn't occurred to me. Look, Scully - "

"What?"

"Don't drive if it's snowing in the morning. This thing can wait a day."

Be careful. Snow is dangerous. Do you see the irony, Mulder?

She decided not to say that.

"One must have a mind of winter," she decided to say.

A beat from Mulder.

"Wallace Stevens?"

Scully laughed softly.

"I'm impressed. All this and a working knowledge of modern American poets, too."

"I'm a renaissance man, Scully."

Then there was silence on the line - a long silence, and Scully could hear the sound of the television playing in Mulder's hotel room. There were no practical, everyday words left to say - nothing about the case, nothing about business. There was goodbye, but it was such a strange word, now - heavy and hard, with too many layers.

Scully flipped over her paperwork, looking at pictures of Ben Oak as a young man. She pulled her knees up and rested her forehead against them as she held the phone to her ear and Mulder still did not talk. She fumbled with the papers in front of her. She lined the photos up, chronologically, so that she could see Ben Oak turn from a young man to a POW to a husband and father and grandfather. She flipped open Josh O'Hara's booklet, the pile of words that hung in the air like an incantation.

          One must have a mind of winter  
          To regard the frost and the boughs   
          Of the pine-trees covered with snow;  
  
          And have been cold a long time  
          To behold the junipers shagged with ice,  
          The spruces rough in the distant glitter

          Of the January sun; and not to think  
          Of any misery in the sound of the wind.

"You still there, Scully?"

"I'm still here. I'm still here."

"OK."


	4. Chapter 4

Part 4

Scully checked her watch. Nine forty-five. She was early.

The house sat near the edge of town - near the edge of New Hampshire, actually. As she climbed from the driver's seat, Scully could see the great steel bridge that arched into Maine. It was a tight neighborhood; the boxlike houses stood close, back-to-back in tiny yards crammed with picnic tables and covered grills and trash barrels. Here and there a bright spot of red or yellow or orange emerged from the white-grey snow: the hulking plastic lawn toys that announced the residence of a small child.

Scully hadn't expected the woman meeting her to be so tall. Violet Ramsey towered a good seven inches above her. Strange, for a woman who must be at least seventy. Scully guessed that in her youth Ms. Ramsey must have hit six feet. Mulder's height.

"Come in, dear," the woman said, opening the front door. "Be careful on the steps. They're slippery."

Scully wiped the slush off her feet. Violet Ramsey ushered her to an overstuffed white chair.

"I hope you like Earl Grey," she said, gesturing to a tea pot. "I'm afraid it's a little strong for some people."

Scully smiled.

"People don't often serve me tea during an interview," she said.

Violet Ramsey smiled back.

"I was startled when you called me last night. It's been so many years... The Hospital has been closed for decades. I was surprised that anyone was curious about it."

"As I told you," Scully said. "My partner and I are investigating a series of deaths among men who were patients at your hospital. Soldiers who were admitted soon after the war."

She pulled out the 8 X 10 photo of the nurses and soldiers. The old woman took it and gazed at it for a long time.

"Look how young we were," she sighed. "Look at Oola and Dave. And the others. But... how many of the men have died?"

Scully sighed.

"To the best of my knowledge, Ms. Ramsey, the only men left alive from this picture are Ben Oak and Dave Larson."

The woman's face fell; her teacup shook in her hand.

"I'm sorry," Scully said. "My partner and I are trying to find a link among these men. Something that would tie them together and give us a clue about their deaths. Do you recall anything unusual about the medical histories of these men? Anything at all?"

Violet Ramsey put her teacup down and looked at Scully.

"Their recoveries."

"Could you be more specific?"

"Back then - right after the war - the Hospital... it was a dumping ground. The men that we saw were... most of them had come back from POW camps. Some of them had been at Normandy... had seen every man they knew slaughtered. They were broken. They weren't able to go back to their families. They weren't able to hold down jobs. They could barely take care of themselves. But this group... something happened to them. They came out of it. All of them. I've never seen it happen so quickly before, and I've never seen it happen since. I can't explain it."

"Were you aware of any medications or unusual treatments that the men may have received which would explain their recoveries? Any nontraditional therapies?"

"Ms. Scully, this was the 1940's. Penicillin had just been invented. That was a miracle to us. There was no prozac or lithium. All we had were tranquilizers for the men who woke up screaming and painkillers for the ones who had physical injuries."

"And you were in charge of administering the medications? You don't think that there was a possibility of tampering?"

The woman shook her head.

"No... no. There weren't many patients on medications, really... and Dr.Grayson and our pharmacist had been with the hospital for years. One of us would have noticed anything improper."

Scully nodded.

"I wish I could be of more help."

"That's all right," Scully said in a tired voice. "It's fifty years ago. But would you mind looking through the photos? Maybe they'll remind you of something."

The woman shifted in her chair as Scully spread the photographs before her. She looked long and hard at the large group photo from the hospital, rattling off memory after memory. Peter Sanchez had lost nine toes to gangrene. Hal Johnson would not take off his hat because he'd gone bald while he was overseas. Don Previte was so combative that they had to sedate him twice. Bill O'Hara woke every night, screaming out in Japanese. Frank Ely didn't sleep once for two weeks straight.

It was a litany of night terrors.

Violet Ramsey moved on to the smaller photos.

"I don't know," she said. "These are from the South Pacific. I wouldn't..."

But then she drew her breath in sharply.

"Oh, that girl," she said. "I had forgotten about her..."

Scully leaned in.

"Which one?"

The woman held out a snapshot so Scully could see it..

"This young girl. Mariana," she said, pointing.

It was the beach photo - the one with the young, healthy James Keller and Ben Oak sitting on the sand between two native girls.

"You knew that girl?" Scully asked.

"Yes. She used to come to visit the Hospital every day. They said she came over from the islands - Lord knows how. She used to sit with Ben Oak for hours at a time. And the other men, too. She was learning English..."

Scully glanced hard at the photo. Mariana. She tried to do the anatomical math: to subtract fifty years from one face, to add it to another. To reconcile the portrait of this young girl on an island with the image of the round woman in the cabin of the stuffed deer. James Keller's wife. The nose. The eyes. The peculiar low hairline. It could be. It had to be.

"Was the girl... Mariana... married?" Scully asked.

"No..." Violet Ramsey answered. "But... then... I guess I really don't know. Ben wasn't married, so I always assumed that Mariana was his girlfriend. But it's a long time ago, and I didn't know them very long. Ben and a lot of the other men were released shortly after Mariana started visiting."

Scully started the engine of the car and turned the heat to "high." She picked up her cell phone and hit the autodial button. The chirping ring was answered immediately.

"Mulder."

"It's me."

"Hi, Scully. You got done early. How did it go?"

"Well, Violet Ramsey doesn't believe that there was any medical testing going on at the hospital. She's pretty sure. In fact, she said that most of the men weren't receiving meds at all. But there was something odd, Mulder. Violet told me that Ben Oak and his friends received regular visits in the time they were at the hospital. From James Keller's wife, Mariana."

"But James Keller was never in that hospital."

"Yes. It's strange. I just got off the phone with Mariana Keller. I'm going to drive back up there and talk to her. I'd like to find out how she was connected to Ben Oak. She may know something that her husband wasn't telling us."

Mulder's voice lightened for a moment.

"This could be the scandalous indiscretion we've been waiting for, Scully."

Scully smiled.

"Look, Mulder... if I'm in Alleman, there's no point in your flying into Boston. It's- "

"I'll fly into Augusta, then."

"Mulder..."

"What?" His voice was sharp.

It's going to snow. Don't try to fly.

"Nothing. OK."

There was a silence.

"Scully, I'll call you. As soon as I'm done talking to Dan Pitman."

Scully clicked the "end" button on her phone and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

It was a hundred miles to Augusta and thirty slow miles to Alleman. Scully pushed the car to move quickly at the end - although the sky had begun dropping, although the road grew grey and then white at its edges as the freeze began to stick.

Mariana Keller welcomed her into the warm house with its yellow light and its smell of coffee already brewing.

Scully glanced around the room of the deer trophies, looking for James Keller, listening for his booming voice.

"Is your husband home, Mrs. Keller?" she asked.

The woman shook her head gently.

"No, no..." she said. "He's gone up north to check on his hunting cabin. Do you need to speak to him? We could - "

"No," said Scully. "Actually, I'm glad to have a chance to speak with you alone. I'd like to ask you some questions about your husband, and the men that he knew in the war. And about you."

Mariana Keller nodded her head and smiled slowly. She pulled out a chair for Scully to sit in. She was not startled by Scully's words; not curious. The wind outside howled, and the lights flickered off, then on.

"It's a heavy storm," Mariana Keller said. "Heavy snow. We are far from things. We lose electricity. I will get the candles."

The woman's voice was soft. It carried the trace of an accent, a hint of foreignness left after fifty years.

Scully looked out the window at the low, grey afternoon. She glanced distractedly at her watch. Still no call from Mulder, and it was nearly three-thirty. She punched his number again. No answer. He might be with Dan Pitman, still. He might have left his phone in the car. He might be at LaGuardia.

Scully shook her head to push away the thoughts, and set her hands busy, spreading photographs over the heavy wooden tabletop. Mariana Keller returned with three tall candles and a silver coffee pot. She lit the candles despite the overhead lights, and poured coffee into two large mugs. When she was done, she settled into a chair and waited, silent and expectant, looking steadily at Scully from across the table.

"Mrs. Keller, you know that men in your husband's group have been dying."

The woman's face registered no change, but Scully could see a quick flicker of her eyes.

"How many men?" she said sadly.

James Keller had not told her.

"All of them. Except your husband, and Daniel Pitman... and two others who are very sick."

There was silence; the woman looked down, staring at her coffee cup, running her thumbs over its rim. Scully picked up one photo - the shot of Ben Oak and James Keller on the beach with Mariana and the other native girl. She held it out to Mariana.

"How did you know the men?" she asked.

The woman took the photo quickly, greedily, and stroked it with her fingers. Another slow smile came to her face.

"My sister and I," she said. "I used to have a copy of this picture. I lost it a long time ago."

"Where was it taken?"

"At home."

Scully tilted her head questioningly.

"I'm sorry," said Mariana Keller. "This is where I am from. Namau. It is near Fiji, the Solomon Islands."

"I've never heard of it."

The woman shrugged.

"It is a small place. It is where my husband met me. And Ben Oak. They made a Naval base there, during the war."

"You knew the men before they were taken prisoner?"

Mariana sighed.

"Yes. Before, and... after. The men from the ship who were taken... the Japanese held them on Tamarau. It was not far from our island. We didn't know if they were safe. Not until the end of the war. But James came back, he made someone take him back to Namau, before he came here. He came to find us."

"Were you engaged?"

The woman looked down at the photo in her hand.

"No." She paused. "No. Not before."

She picked up another photograph - the one of Ben Oak and James Keller with a white-haired native man.

"This is my father," she said.

Scully gazed at the picture.

"Did your husband know him well?"

"He knew James, yes. He took them out on his boat, when they would come onto Namau. I had no brothers. My father was fond of these men - Ben, and James, and Bill - but of Ben most of all. He called him 'my son.' "

Scully watched as the woman sank deep into remembrance. Fifty years.

"What happened? How did you come to the United States?"

Mariana Keller was silent for several long moments, gazing at the picture of her father. Finally she spoke, and her voice was tender and reverent.

"Namau was a small place," she said. "There were only ten families in my village. The war was... not kind to us. My father died. He was an old man. And after that, an epidemic came. Many people died, then. My mother. My sister. I was all alone. I thought that I would die of loneliness. I was waiting to die."

"But you married James."

Mariana Keller glanced up. Her eyes looked into Scully's.

"James loved me. He loves me. He said that I was with him when he was in prison - that thinking about me kept him from getting too sick, from getting crazy like the other ones. He brought me here. He did not want me to die."

Scully picked up the photograph of the men in the hospital. She scanned the young faces, tried to imagine them grown old and grey, tired and sick.

"Mrs. Keller," Scully said. "What happened in the hospital? Why did you visit Ben Oak and the others?"

The woman sighed and moved her eyes over the photos laid out before her.

"I thought... I believed..."

"Believed what?" Scully asked.

"My father," Mariana Keller said. "My father was an old, old man. He was from an old time when there were many strange ideas. When I was a small girl, he would tell me stories. He told me that there were... I don't know how to say it in English... holy men. Men who had words to guard the soul of their people. That the words of a holy man tied the souls of the people together."

The lights flickered again - off, then on, and off again. They did not come back this time, and the women were left sitting in yellow candle-light. Scully wondered about heat, about refrigeration, about water, and watched Mariana Keller's face. It was impassive.

"We are far from things," the woman said. "It happens sometimes."

Scully leaned back in her chair.

"Mrs. Keller, what did you think of your father's stories?"

The woman smiled.

"I laughed at my old father, then. I was a spoiled girl, because I had black leather shoes and could wear lipstick and curl my hair. I thought that my father said crazy, old things. But when he died... and the sickness came... I believed him. All of my people were gone. I believed that my soul was loose, waiting to be taken. I needed to see Ben."

"Why Ben?" Scully asked.

"He listened to my father's words. He did not say that my father was crazy. My father loved him. I thought that my father had taught him things... words to say... to take back my soul. Maybe I was crazy, then. I believed the things my father had said."

"Do you still?" Scully asked.

Mariana took the photograph of the young soldiers. She held it up to the flickering candlelight and traced it with her hand. Her finger stopped at the face of Bill O'Hara.

"The men were not... they were empty. Like me. But Ben did not belong in that place. He only went there went for Bill, I think. Because he could not stand to leave him there. James took me to speak to Ben, to ask him about my father. He told me to hush, not to speak of such things. But James was living near, and I was so alone... I went more often. I went to see the men who were half alive, like me. The ones whose souls were loose."

Mariana Keller's voice trailed off and her eyes grew intent on the photograph one more time. Scully rose and carried a candlestick to the window. It was darkening outside. The snowflakes were large, now. She could see the tree branches bending low under the white, frozen weight.

"Mrs. Keller," she said, finally, moving back to her seat and her coffee. "Do you believe that Ben Oak saved those men? Do you believe that he saved you?"

Mariana Keller was silent for a moment.

"Not me," she said. "Not me. Ben saw that James loved me. He saw my belly swelling. He saw that I was tied here - that I was tied to James. I thought my soul was loose. But Ben knew that it was not."

Scully smiled gently.

"And the others?"

"I do not know. I do not know what Ben told my husband. I do not know what he told Bill. Or those other men. I only know that there were letters. Ben gave words to the men, and they gave words to each other. I think that they were... tied. I think..."

But Mariana Keller stopped and stood up.

"The coffee is cold. It is getting late. The snow is bad."

The woman took the tray and moved out of the room, her shadow huge and trembling in the candlelight. Scully felt her words hanging in the air, felt the weight of them, the importance. But her mind could think only the snow and the time. She glanced at her watch and looked again out the window. It was full-dark, now, and no light from the house and no light from the sky. From the road came a roar of heavy scraping. A snow plow going by. Some twist of fear ran through Scully at the thought of the snow and the road.

It was late. Mulder should have called.

She switched on her cell phone but received a "no signal" message. She leaned closer to the window. Still no luck.

Mariana was back in the room.

"The cell phone is out," Scully said. "The switching station must have lost power. Could I try yours?"

Mariana Keller picked up the headpiece to her own wall telephone and shook her head.

"Mine isn't working either."

Scully sighed and stared out the window again. This place was so far away from everything, from lights and the world. Mulder.

"I need to go. I need to get in contact with my partner."

"The roads are - "

"I'll be fine. I have four-wheel drive, and the snow plow just went by. It's not too far to the hotel... and they may have power there. Or phone lines, at least."

The road was passable; the snow on the ground was loose, not packed into ice as it would have been under a load of traffic. Scully moved steadily at first, looking ahead for signs of light, for signs of the end of the woods. But of course, there were no streetlamps on this stretch of road; it was too isolated to be lit.

The radio was full of reports of the storm, of downed power lines and lost phone communication. Places to go if you needed emergency shelter, if you had lost electrical heat. But the sounds coming through were mostly static, and the information was cheerless, and Scully shut it off.

She wondered where Mulder was, why he hadn't called. She wondered where the next switching station was, where her phone would come back into service.

The road was passable, but the falling snow was blinding, closing around the car like a blurring curtain, until Scully found herself leaning forward, as if the blur were in her eyes, in her mind, as if squinting would clear it from around her.

She thought of Ben Oak. She thought of a young man, standing on a beach in the South Pacific. She thought of a father. She thought of an old man sitting in a blue vinyl chair, gazing out the window of a dim, warm nursing home. She thought of the photograph lying on his chest of drawers. The Holy Man.

The snow hissed like a quiet threat around the windows. The night pressed against the car, closed in on it.

Scully shook her head. The night was only the night.

          One must have a mind of winter  
          To regard the frost and the boughs   
          Of the pine-trees crusted with snow  
          ... and not to think  
          of any misery in the sound of the wind.

Scully thought of Wallace Stevens, of his words taking this night and taming it, making it real and permanent and only night, only winter, setting it forever on paper, harmless.

But the wind hissed again.

Not to think of the road. Not to think of the silence of the phone.

She pulled her mind to the case, thought of all the young men lost fifty years ago, cut loose from their families and homes by a war, ruined by things they saw, thrown together in a place and left for lost. But found, somehow. Found.

She thought of Dan Pitman, a priest now, saved fifty years ago, during the war. She thought of funerals and midnight mass, and the words that trailed on the air, then, thick with incense and truth that could catch you up, could hold you inside, could make you part of something great. She thought of Dan Pitman. Left alive after the others were gone.

She thought of young Mariana Keller, of James Keller surviving a prison camp to find her again.

She thought of all the other men, dead.

"They gave words to each other."

And lost them, one way or another. Took them back by breaking the chain.

Or had them taken back.

She thought of Ben Oak, sitting in the blue vinyl chair, and his mind, taking in the daylight, watching his daughter and grandchildren. And no words to give, now. His voice taken from him three months ago.

Just before the other men began dying.

Did the old man know that his words were lost? Did he feel his own silence like a weight?

It was so quiet, now, and no sound from the world.

The snow rushed toward the car like a curtain of stars. It fell in great flakes. It flew at the car, stealing the brightness of the headlights, reflecting it back. The sides of the road were invisible; the trees were hidden. A tunnel of white rushed at the car, catching it up in its beauty. Scully felt her heart beating strongly, pounding in her chest until she could hear it, and she realized that it was fear that her heart was telling her. She could not see the road, and she could not see the sharp embankment, and all the while the snow was pulling her eyes upward, drawing her vision to its silent, icy beauty.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I...

The words slipped from her mind for just a moment, for the length of a last glance at the snow-tunnel, a lingering admiration of it.

And then the cell phone rang, and Scully braked the car, and Mulder's voice was on the line, ragged and loose with fear and fatigue.

"Scully, where have you been? I've been trying to call you for hours."

Mulder's words, and they sounded to Scully like a blessing tonight, and her reply like a blessing.

 

 

End

  
 


End file.
